Leonard Susskind Quotes

• There is a philosophy that says that if something is unobservable -- unobservable in principle -- it is not part of science. If there is no way to falsify or confirm a hypothesis, it belongs to the realm of metaphysical speculation, together with astrology and spiritualism. By that standard, most of the universe has no scientific reality -- it's just a figment of our imaginations.

  Leonard Susskind

  Philosophy, Science, Reality

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• There is so much to groak; So little to groak from.

  Leonard Susskind

  Littles

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• I'm not an historian but I'll venture an opinion: Modern cosmology really began with Darwin and Wallace. Unlike anyone before them, they provided explanations of our existence that completely rejected supernatural agents... Darwin and Wallace set a standard not only for the life sciences but for cosmology as well.

  Leonard Susskind

  Atheism, Agents, Venture

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• Einstein, in the special theory of relativity, proved that different observers, in different states of motion, see different realities.

  Leonard Susskind

  Reality, Special, Different

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• Every time a bit of information is erased, we know it doesn't disappear. It goes out into the environment. It may be horribly scrambled and confused, but it never really gets lost. It's just converted into a different form.

  Leonard Susskind

  Confused, Different, May

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• Unforeseen surprises are the rule in science, not the exception. Remember: Stuff happens.

  Leonard Susskind

  Stuff Happens, Remember, Surprise

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• You have to say now that space is something. Space can vibrate, space can fluctuate, space can be quantum mechanical, but what the devil is it?

  Leonard Susskind

  Space, Devil, Quantum

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• I was from a poor Jewish family in the South Bronx. My father was a plumber, but when I was 16, he got sick and I had to take over. Being a plumber in the South Bronx wasn't fun.

  Leonard Susskind

  Fun, Father, Sick

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• [Richard Feynman] truly believed that if you couldn't explain something simply, you didn't understand it.

  Leonard Susskind

  Motivation, Inspiration, Simply You

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• I'm afraid I am a bit of a technophobe - a nineteenth-century man caught in the twenty-first century. But there is one piece of technology that I would especially welcome: a device to automatically balance restaurant tables on all four legs so that they don't rock back and forth.

  Leonard Susskind

  Technology, Men, Rocks

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• I did not come from an academic background. My father was a smart man, but he had a fifth-grade education. He and all his friends were plumbers. They were all born around 1905 in great poverty in New York City and had to go to work when they were 12 or 13 years old.

  Leonard Susskind

  New York, Father, Smart

  "Can Physics Experiments Catch Up?". Interview with Anil Ananthaswamy, www.slate.com. March 2, 2013.

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• A lot of my research time is spent daydreaming - telling an imaginary admiring audience of laymen how to understand some difficult scientific idea.

  Leonard Susskind

  Ideas, Research, Daydreaming

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• I was going to engineering school but fell in love with physics.

  Leonard Susskind

  School, Engineering, Physics

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• Science blogs bore me. When everyone is an expert, no one is an expert.

  Leonard Susskind

  Experts, Bores, Blogs

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• We often say that the earth is a sphere, but to be precise, the term sphere refers only to the surface. The correct mathematical term for the solid earth is a ball.

  Leonard Susskind

  Balls, Earth, Spheres

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